* Following up on a post I did about a month ago regarding cartoonist Mike Dawson discussing how he has not seen a sustainable audience build for his comics work, I wanted to note a post by R. Fiore at The Comics Journal (hat tip to Tom Spurgeon) which should have every working and aspiring cartoonist thinking feverishly about their options.
* Fiore is one of the longest-running Journal commentators, and also one of the magazine's -- and therefore the industry's -- smartest observers. Fiore acknowledges the much-linked-to Abhay Khosla response to Dawson's original piece, highlighting both its strengths and its weaknesses. I do love me some AK, but I am sure even he would admit that Fiore's understanding of how the industry works trumps just about everyone else's.
* Fiore wisely compares Dawson's dilemma with an earlier debate over digital comics, spurred by Mark Waid's somewhat groundbreaking digital initiative. He pulls it all together with the sad, Capitalist truth that it's the evolutionary forces at work in the market that decide who gets paid and who doesn't, not some invisible moral imperative that favours good cartoonists and culls the bad ones from the herd. Very much like the music industry, which digital technology has transformed utterly (with corporations, and musicians to a lesser extent, kicking and screaming every step of the way), cartoonists have to evolve into the new paradigm. If they think drawing a comic, story or graphic novel means their work is done and the Brinks truck is backing into their driveway, they think wrong. Just because you build it, that doesn't mean anyone will show up, and no one is automatically entitled to a living in Los Estados Unidos (not yet, anyway).
* Fiore notes that "we have entered into an environment in which its never been easier to disseminate your work and its never been more difficult to make a buck from it." And in the traditional sense, that is true. Look at James Kochalka, who many years ago devoted an entire graphic novel to the premise "Quit Your Job." Kochalka's comics and graphic novels sales figures have never been made public that I am aware of, but he has been tireless in finding other sources of income, from subscriptions to his now-ended American Elf daily web strip to licensing his song Hockey Monkey as a TV series theme, to turning his Super-F*ckers comic into an animated series. Kochalka is probably the most energetic cartoonist I've ever met, and I am sure that energy is invaluable in driving him to find ways to monetize his comics and musical work.
* "Monetize" is a word that rankles a lot of people, with its implication of "selling out." Over the 14 years I have maintained Comic Book Galaxy in one way or another, I have occasionally attempted to monetize the site -- but in its best year advertising revenue brought in less than a hundred bucks a month, and that did not last long, and it was well over a decade ago. Yes, the site was far more popular then, with tens of thousands of daily visitors, but when I look back, I think that the biggest obstacle to maintaining revenue was just me. I saw what we were doing as important and valuable (yes, I was hella naive), and my focus was entirely on the quality of the writing on the site and the relative merit of the comics and graphic novels we were covering. I didn't get into it to be a business person, and I have a feeling a lot of cartoonists feel the same way.
* The difference is, I never expected my online projects to generate a living wage for me. I don't know if Dawson expects or believes he is entitled to just make comics and that alone will make him enough to live his life the way he wants, but I do think a lot of cartoonists with less experience than Dawson (and let's acknowledge his courage in bringing this issue to light at all) are living under the illusion that great success is already a sure thing, they are just waiting for the right break to come along.
* "Gods do favors, Darwin doesn't," is the thrust of Fiore's piece at TCJ, and the fact of the matter is, as Alan Moore once wisely noted, the only place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind. Increasingly, that's also the only place where the idea of a cartoonist being able to make a livable income solely with their work exists. Is it right? Is it wrong? Those questions are irrelevant. It's the way it is. If you want to be a cartoonist, be one -- be a great one! But if you want to be able to afford food, clothing, housing and the other expenses of daily living, make sure you have a day job, or a solid plan to monetize the hell out of your work in comics. It's almost impossible to imagine you'll do it merely by publishing your work in book form, so if you find the idea of "monetizing" your comics distasteful or too time-consuming to imagine, well, like I said up front -- you should be thinking pretty hard about your options. R. Fiore knows what he's talking about, and it's unlikely your work is so awesome that it's going to overcome the obstacles facing cartoonists today.
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